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Donghoon Jun: We were enamored with the idea
of trying to create a fictional universe.
In the past, we weren't able to get the look that we wanted.
I really had to fight the darkness.
James Thornton: With the iPhone 12 Pro,
we were able to shoot so much better in low light.
Donghoon: We were very excited to shoot Dark Universe,
but we had to contend with,
“How do you film darkness?”
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Donghoon: What are the parts that build up
this fictional universe?
James: What would set it off?
Donghoon: How do we show energy itself?
And we thought about plasma tubes.
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James: And so that's where you get these
jumping electrical arcs.
So when we shoot those in slo-mo,
it suddenly could look like lightening or,
shoot it at 4K, it can look like neurons firing.
Donghoon: We used a blue, green, and red lasers
in different combinations.
James:What looks like different currents:
icy liquid, kinda ripples.
Donghoon: This contraption that we've nicknamed
‘cloud tank',
it's just water, some paint, and balloon.
James: And capturing that at a higher frame rate
can give the impression of clouds, or,
could this be the formation of our universe?
Three, two, one: [BALLOON POP]
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Donghoon: Clear glass playing with some water,
some bits of ink, and some hydrogen peroxide,
and we simulate sort of a galaxy that is blooming
and spreading throughout this vast blackness.
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James: Not just the blacks, but,
what's right there next to the blacks
that add some dimension to it.
It just kinda opened up the doors for
exploring a lot of different things.
Donghoon: Using a simple object,
I can obscure a light to create an eclipse.
James: Blast air through a tube,
hits the corn starch,
corn starch flies past the torch,
that ignites it.
Donghoon: It's meant to suggest like
infusing energy into matter.
James: We came up with this idea of using
a piston to basically push the rocks up.
Then we could explore, like,
how do we move the camera.
Donghoon: We decided that the best way
to do that was a free fall.
Luckily, the iPhone stabilizes the lens very carefully.
We ourselves, or the audience, hurl through.
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No damage, so no worries.
James: After all this chaotic, otherworldly stuff,
we really wanted to be able to kind of calm down and like,
come to almost like a resting state.
On one of our finished creations,
one of these planets,
where like it's basically it's first dawn,
it's the first time you get to see the sun come up.
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James: In our universe, the land seems to move around.
Donghoon: Like different organisms,
or an earthquake, or sort of undulating surface.
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I use magnets to make the iron filings spike up.
James: It kind of becomes its own living thing.
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Donghoon: So we're vibrating tiny amounts of glitter.
What really helps us is the new,
longer telephoto lens to get closer,
and make the sparkle moments a lot bigger.
James: It really could be anything.
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What comes next, we were thinking,
what sort of fluids are there?
Donghoon: With ferro fluids reacting to magnetism,
it takes shape ━ becomes spiky,
very aggressive looking.
James: Maybe the water itself is its own organism.
Donghoon: It consumes and it hunts
and that it wraps and surrounds things ━
kinda like a Loch Ness monster in a Dark Universe.
We have arrangements of this magnetic putty
and we place a very, very strong magnet overhead.
James: We can see solid matter
but it's behaving in a strange way.
Donghoon: Against gravity, and stretches out itself.
We use Non-Newtonian fluid.
James: When forces applied, it hardens up.
The speaker basically is just
a lot of movement and force rapidly.
Donghoon: It almost looks like an organism fighting back.
Micro-powder was one my favorite experiments
of the film.
I've actually tried it once before,
but I wasn't quite able to get the tones I was looking for,
and because of the ability to capture high dynamic range
on the new iPhone,
I was able to capture all the tones all the way from,
peaking beautiful sparkles,
down to very deep dark tones.
We're using glow in the dark luminescent fluid,
shooting microbes or microbial organisms.
Without any external light, we had enough in the scene.
I wanted to shoot darkness as a feature in this film;
darkness to be its own element that exists,
that you can touch.
These are the moments that we take the audience into really,
really unfamiliar territory.
Now that we're finally done shooting,
I'm so excited to show you guys what we've shot.
I'm really proud of it.
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